


No real belief and no hand for me to hold

by theaa



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, F/M, Pining, ambivalent pol!jon here bc she doesn't know!, and for jon to come back home, and she just needs to rest her poor sweet totally in love head down, but sansa is a hun, everything is awful!, just like a whole load of it, we don't know if he's just an idiot!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-07
Updated: 2019-05-07
Packaged: 2020-02-27 11:38:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18738259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theaa/pseuds/theaa
Summary: A safety net. That had been her parting gift. She hadn’t even received a goodbye in return.Sansa-centric. Post 8x04. Sansa tries to sort out her feelings.





	No real belief and no hand for me to hold

**Author's Note:**

> I tried to write something more like a fix-it fic and turns out I’m not quite there yet. Have this drabble instead. Sorry.

The door to her solar shuts with a click as Brienne leaves. Sansa’s eyes sting, from a habit shehasn’t managed to shed, soft and girlish as she still secretly is. Brienne’s glassy eyes, informing her of Jaime’s departure in the night, had summoned answering tears that she’d struggled not to show. She always feels the urge to cry when someone else does. Sansa had let Brienne go, telling her to rest; had accepted Jaime’s desertion with a swallow and a nod and noted it down as yet another example of why love is not something to be  _trusted_. It never is.  _Gods_ , but she wishes someone would show her otherwise.  _Someone_ to tell her that the secret she keeps buried deep, deep within her heart is not something to be ashamed of. 

 _Life is not a song, sweetling_. No, she thinks, I know it is not. Yet knowing is a different thing from  _feeling_. 

She pulls off her leather gloves and drops them onto the desk, moving to pick up a quill. She dips it into the inkwell and hovers over a page of fresh parchment. To whom is she writing? What can she do from behind her desk in the North? Her vision blurs. The ink slides from the quill and blotches, an ugly black stain. She has been rationing parchment and now she wastes it, she berates herself automatically. She sets down the quill again with a sigh.

What is love, if not betrayal?

Brienne wants to go to King’s Landing, it’s clear. The promise she’s lived by, sworn by, never to go south again hangs heavy over her head.

She wishes Tyrion would write, but there is no word from him. There is no one left in Winterfell now, save Bran, Brienne, Podrick, Gilly and Sam.

She thinks of Arya in King’s Landing again and she shivers. 

No Tyrion, no Dragon Queen, no Jaime. No Varys, no Tormund, or any of the wildlings. No Gendry, no Davos, not even the Hound. 

No Theon.

And no  _Jon_.

She thinks of his face in the Godswood, how he couldn’t even bring himself to form the words himself. She thinks of candlelit conversations and heavy breathing and the flicker of something she should snuff out. A tent months ago and the swift sharp cut of ‘a _nd how should I be smarter? By listening to you?_ ’ She was angry before, but now she wants to weep. Open her hands to cup the tears that fall from her eyelashes. ‘ _Yes,_ ’ she wants to gasp. ‘ _Please, listen to me_.’

She doesn’t regret telling Tyrion. As much as she has said otherwise, Tyrion is not a stupid man. He admires her. Standing on the battlements she’d weighed that admiration in her hand and found it to be better, more useful than keeping her word. If Tyrion were to think Jon the rightful King, perhaps he could be saved. Perhaps Tyrion or  _someone_  will intervene before Daenerys burns him for a threat when she too has decided that love is not enough. If that makes her a traitor, so be it. 

A safety net. That had been her parting gift. She hadn’t even received a goodbye in return. 

She misses Ghost. Her hand drifts to the side of her chair, where the beast used to curl up when his master was away in Dragonstone. Her fingers itch to sink into the soft thick fur, to be closer to him in any way possible. She swallows. The wolves are all gone now – every one of them. 

She cannot think the same will happen to her family. She will not. She will  _not_. 

Sansa lifts her palms and presses the heels of her hands to her eyes until the moisture there traps and the darkness behind her eyelids starts to swim into bruising purples and reds.

Jon has always been a martyr. First taking the black, offering to fight Ramsey one-on-one, and now this idiocy with Daenerys. He cannot truly love her? Surely, he cannot. They’ve had no chance to talk about it, no chance to talk about  _anything_  before Daenerys dragged the troops, tired and injured and unready, out of Winterfell. She’s seen Daenerys look at him, her beautiful face  _aglow_ with love, and she wonders, fears, that if anyone were to look to her, they would see the same. 

 _Jon_. 

Is it blind loyalty, simple-minded honour, or is it something deeper? Is it  _stupidity_ , or is it something else? Her mind aches with it. She wishes she knew. She wishes she could reach a hand into her chest and trap her heart in her fist to stop its fluttering. 

She drops her hands, digs them in the wool of her dress instead. Cousin to a Targaryen prince. Cousin to a man called Jon Snow, the  _best_  man she’s ever known. She doesn’t know who the former is. That man is a stranger to her. 

She wants to believe in him. She wants to believe so badly her throat aches and her ribs hurt and she falls into bed each night, exhausted with the wanting. But Sansa knows it is not often that she gets what she wants. 

So yes, she told Tyrion. 

And yes, she loves him.

She loves him.

She can’t help herself.

_Life is not a song, sweetling.  
_

Perhaps she will settle for a melody instead. Just a tiny part of one. One where Jon is safe and alive and that’s all.

It could be enough. She wants it to be enough. 

**Author's Note:**

> As usual, I'm theawants on tumblr y'all x


End file.
